Thus, the glen where murder had been committed; the pond in which the mother had immersed her new-born infant; the hoary ruin pregnant with horrid legends of the past; the rocks over which the inebriated drunkard fell; the four cross roads where the suicide was impaled; the dwelling of the miser, or of him who did unjustly to the orphan; and the willow-banks of the still-flowing river into which the love-lorn maiden had cast herself,—each had its spectre, and at the midnight hour the ghost of the murdered bared to the moon the mementos of its foul and most unnatural end; the spectre of the murderer, writhing in agony, rattled its gibbet-chains; the suffocating sobs of the drowning infant were borne on the fitful breeze; hideous spectres hovered o'er the deserted ruin; the ghost of the miser guarded its quondam treasures; the cruel guardian and the suicide shrieked forth the agonies of the damned; and the phantom of the deceived maiden gliding on the banks of her watery grave, mingled its plaintive wails with each sough of the midnight wind.
But, alas! this prolific source of terror and romance must be consigned to the delusions of the past; and the churchyard—erst pregnant with "thin-sheeted phantoms"—is now also shorn of its gloomy horrors, and regarded alone as the last quiet resting-place of man on earth.
Even when glimpses of the spirit-world are vouchsafed to those who still firmly believe in occasional visitations from its inhabitants, it would seem that the fashion of their appearance has become more in accordance with the quiet well-regulated ideas of the age. The major part of those terrible attributes of the nether world, that of old were delighted in, are no longer exhibited, and they are numbered with the things that have been. The form which appertained to Satan himself—the cloven foot, the forked tail, the hirsute frame, and the horned head—must also vanish before the march of civilisation; hence Mephistopheles, in the "Faust" of Goëthe, is represented as saying:—
"Refinement too, which smoothens all
O'er which it in the world has pass'd,
Has been extended in its call,
And reached the devil, too, at last.
That northern phantom found no more can be,
Horns, tail, and claws, we now no longer see,
As for the foot—I cannot spare it,
But were I openly to wear it,
It might do greater harm than good
To me among the multitude.
And so like many a youth beside,
Who bravely to the eye appears,
Yet something still contrives to hide,
I've worn false calves for many years!"
The phenomena upon which the belief of the occasional manifestation of disembodied spirits to man is founded, may be accounted for without having recourse to the doctrine of supernatural interposition.
Our senses and our reasoning powers are apt to err. We may deceive ourselves, and are liable to be deceived by an erroneous appreciation of the sensations which we receive from the objects surrounding us—illusions—but of the nature of which we may readily convince ourselves.
Illusions of the sight may arise either from an error of judgment, or from a disordered state of the eye.
Of those illusions arising from an error of judgment, perhaps none bear directly upon our subject. Examples of this kind of illusion are the broken appearance of a stick partially immersed in water; the apparent movement of trees, houses, &c., past a train in motion, or the banks of a river past a steamboat.
Illusions arising from a disordered condition of the eye, prompting the imagination, are a prolific source of ghost-seeing.